Hi Aimée! Good news and bad news on the topic of being an author; the cost of being an author is cheaper than it’s ever been, but if you dream of being a Wildly Successful Author, you will have to work hard and possibly still not get there. OTOH, you might enjoy the journey more than the end goal (my wife, Deb, certainly has).

Unlike the bad old days, getting a book self-published is fairly inexpensive, because you don’t have to order 500 copies that you then have to sell. Services like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing or Lulu.com let you upload your book and put it out on the market, available for printing on demand or e-copies. (They will also offer extra services like editing, cover design, marketing tips — hey, they have to make a buck, right?)

Hardest thing for us, as a kids book, was finding an illustrator we liked. Sounds like you already have one of those. 😊

Other fun (?) parts are things like assembling the book (Word works fine, for the most part, but there are other tools out there), pricing the book (more pages, more content, more expensive to print, but you don’t want to charge more than the current market price for a book, so how much do you squeeze your profit margin?), and marketing it yourself (watch out for scams! We still get calls offering us the chance to get our book distributed to stores for only “minor fees” 🤮).

Still, it can be fun! You can probably find any number of people on Medium who have done this and written about it. Good luck if you go for it!

[And thanks for the shout out and the book purchase, Dennett!]